Heroku builds Postgres app for Mac users

Platform-as-a-service poster child Heroku is doubling down on the PostgreSQL database. The company, which built its platform atop Postgres and offers the Heroku Postgres database service, has now built an app that makes it easy for Mac users to download and get started using the database.

While the app, aptly named Postgres.app, isn’t directly tied to Heroku’s platform or its database services, there’s definitely a connection. For one, Heroku’s Mattt Thompson writes in a blog post on the new product, “The majority of active apps on Heroku use Postres, but we found that many developers use SQLite or MySQL on their local development machines. This can lead to subtle and hard-to-diagnose problems,” he said.

And although there’s no freemium situation or anything at play, getting more developers using Postgres locally probably does make them more likely to use Heroku Postgres for their cloud database needs.

Postgres.app comes equipped with a number of popular libraries and features, including PostGIS 2.0 for geospatial data and search; PLV8 for JavaScript programming using the V8 engine, and hstore for a key-value data store. Heroku says the app should be available in the Mac App Store in a couple weeks pending Apple’s approval.